Meditation and Poetics – 96 – Haiku – 9 (Haiku continued)

That’s Issa, who is the most like William Carlos Williams in temperament – that is to say, he includes himself as a solitary, lonesome, weepy object, a sort of objective picture of self.He was the one that had for a brushwood gate, for a lock, the snail. He also was the one,

The young girl

blew her nose

in the evening glory

Beaten at battledore and shuttlecock

the beautiful maiden’s anger.

That’s like a tiny novel, too.

An autumn night, Dreams, snores

The chirping of crickets.

That could lead to a (Walt) Whitmanline, “The old man sleeping in the Oklahoma night, dreaming, snoring, amid the chirping of crickets.”

Angry and offended

I came back

the willow tree in the garden.

This is one that I’ve always liked, because it conjures up a whole geography and a season and an emotion and an objectivity that follows the emotion and a gap.

Not a single stone

to throw at the dog

The wintry moon.

Ground all frozen.He actually couldn’t pick a stone up off the frozen ground because the stones were frozen to the ground.And there he was in the frozen ground, suddenly noticing the wintry moon, also, and his anger.“Not a single stone to throw at the moon” — gap, breath — “Not a single stone to throw at the moon? The wintry dog.”The dog at the wintry door.“Not a single stone to throw at the dog.The wintry moon.”

Then to get some sense of sacred mystery, again through purely material means:

The travelling altar just set down,

Swayed with an earthquake On the summer moor.

You have all of the awe of nature in that – The travelling altar/just set down/swayed with an earthquake on the summer moor. You really couldn’t get more cosmic, actually.

Back to Issa, relating to anger and emotion and then a gap and realization.

Striking the fly

I also hit

a flowering plant.

So he’s again, like Williams, totally material in a sense and personal – the most personal of the haiku artists.

The thunderstorm having cleared up

the evening sun shines on a tree

where a locust is chirping.

That’s quite a jump.The thunderstorm:Having conjured up a thunderstorm in the first line – “The thunderstorm having cleared up/the evening sun shines on a tree/where a locust is chirping.” – So you have this vast thunderstorm and attention narrowing down to that single sound, through the slanting rays of the sun, on a tree and the single chirp of a cicada.Beginning, then, with Wagnerian majestic cloud and ending on a very tiny note.

This for a suggestion of pathos or compassion or without mentioning, without mentioning pathos, compassion or any abstraction:

Mountain persimmons..

Mountain persimmons,that is to say, obviously, uncultivated. Somebody’s up there gathering wild persimmons, perhaps out of hunger.But, anyway:

Mountain persimmons

the mother is eating

the astringent parts

So who got the sweet parts? – “Mountain persimmons/the mother is eating/the astringent partsThen the one of space that I mentioned before:

It walked with me

as I walked

the scarecrow in the distance.

That’s a funny kind of common optical perception that’s exemplified in that.